RevOps teams are redesigning workflows before adding another AI tool

Operators and investors,

This issue was due on Wednesday, but delayed with a couple of days due to on-site executive meetings with a strategic executive partner at the office. Now that I’m getting back to the day-to-day of my inbox, the focus of this week is RevOps.

96% of revenue leaders expect their teams to use AI this year, and the distance between using it and getting a result from it is widening (Gong, State of Revenue AI).

Most revenue teams added tools that record calls, transcribe meetings, and surface insights. Far fewer added tools that take an action, so the portfolio company ends up with more dashboards and the same manual process running underneath them. The rep still does the work by hand, and the operating cost the sponsor was told would fall has not moved.

This issue covers 4 topics:

• Why observation tools outsold action tools

• What redesigning a workflow means in practice

• Why tool sprawl is now the constraint on AI, and how to read it

• How to sequence redesign against deployment

It is also written for operating partners and portfolio CEOs approving revenue tooling spend, drawing on the RevOps work for portfolio companies we run across PE-backed platforms.

1. Why observation tools outsold action tools

A RevOps lead gets recording and summarising approved easily, because it carries no process risk, needs no change to how anyone works, and demos well in 20 minutes.

A tool that takes an action requires somebody to decide what the correct action is, who is accountable when the tool takes it, and what happens when it takes the wrong one. That decision belongs to management, and it lands on a RevOps team that is already the smallest function in the company.

So the buying pattern is rational at the individual level and produces a poor result in aggregate. The portfolio company holds 6 or 8 revenue tools, each defensible, none of which removed a step from the process.

I would put one test to any revenue tool before renewal. Name the task a person stopped doing when it was deployed, and if nobody stopped doing anything, the tool added visibility to a cost base and left the cost base alone.

2. What redesigning a workflow means in practice

Take the lead handoff that exists in every B2B portfolio company. The common version has marketing scoring a lead, routing it to a queue, a rep picking it up, and a manager reviewing the queue weekly for coverage. An AI layer added to that process summarises the lead and drafts the first email, and the rep still owns judging, claiming, sequencing, and logging.

Routing runs on fit and engagement data with no queue in between, the first touch goes out automatically against defined criteria, the rep enters at the reply, and the manager reviews exceptions only. The tool is much the same one, and the process has 3 fewer human steps.

2 companies buying the same platform report different results 12 months later, and the difference is that one of them changed the sequence of work.

3. Why tool sprawl is now the constraint

Years of RevOps tool adoption produced redundancy, and the redundancy now bogs the team down in manual reconciliation between platforms that overlap.

The specific costs show up in 3 places:

• Duplicate systems of record: 2 platforms both claim to hold the customer, so somebody reconciles them, and the reconciliation is manual because neither is authoritative

• Integration maintenance: every connector between tools breaks on a vendor update, and the RevOps team spends its week repairing pipes while the motion goes unimproved

• Contradictory reporting: 2 tools produce 2 numbers for the same metric, and the board meeting spends 20 minutes deciding which one to believe

An agentic tool dropped into that environment inherits all of it, because reliability depends on the underlying data and process being coherent.

RevOps was the steward of process and data, and it is becoming the governor of systems that act on their own, which needs cleaner data and tighter process than most portfolio companies have.

Closing the gap between the 2 groups costs process design time and no additional license spend, which is why it rarely gets a budget line and rarely gets done.

4. How to sequence redesign against deployment

I advised a $110M B2B services platform through this sequence last year. We mapped the revenue motion end to end and counted human touchpoints from first contact to closed revenue, which came to 22. Roughly a third existed because a system could not talk to another system. The redesign removed 6 touchpoints before any new software was bought, and the platform later deployed 2 tools against a process that had already been simplified.

The sequence runs in 4 steps:

1. Map the motion and count the human touchpoints

2. Remove the ones that exist only to bridge systems, which is usually the largest group and needs no vendor

3. Define what the remaining steps look like when a tool performs them, including who is accountable for a wrong action

4. Evaluate software against that definition, never against a demo

A RevOps maturity assessment run before a purchase costs a fraction of the licence and changes what gets bought, because the shortlist narrows once the requirement is written down as a process.

The timing matters because most portfolio companies signed multi-year revenue tooling in the last cycle, and those contracts are coming up while the AI category is being repriced.

This week, run a 60-minute session with the RevOps lead on your largest holding. Two questions to think about:

1. For every revenue tool we pay for, name the task a person stopped doing when we deployed it, and mark the ones where nobody stopped doing anything.

2. How many human touchpoints sit between first contact and closed revenue today, and how many of those exist only because 2 systems do not talk to each other.

Score each answer red, yellow, or green. A red on the first question across most of the stack means the next AI purchase will land on the same process and produce the same result.

Mario

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For PE partners and operators seeking alpha

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